Saving Your Relationships From Death by Cellphone

Angels baseball pitcher Jared Weaver was quoted in an article in the OC Register yesterday by sports writer Jeff Fletcher yesterday that things are very different in the Angels clubhouse before games now than they were when he came up to the majors in 2006. Players used to talk, bond and communicate with each other freely. Now people are, "checking all their stuff on their phones." Minnesota Twins manager Paul Molitor has made a rule asking his team to not use phones for 30 minutes before all regular season games. It is hard to regulate adults, but clearly cell phone use is impacting relationships not only on sports teams but also at work, between couples and within families.

It's great to stay connected, but when are we too connected to our cellphones and not connected enough in person, live with the people we live with? How can we put some limits on our phone habits so we are intentionally present in our relationships? What rules can we set with our children and teens, and what can we negotiate to clear sacred space for our relationship with family and close friends?

In the Sunday, March 22 edition of the New York Times, writer Bruce Feiler focused on cellphones in his This Life column. Fieler reminds us that despite children and teens having cellphones, you are still the parent. I like to remind parents in family counseling that they are the co-architects of their families and can take bold moves to make families stronger and better places to be. Cellphone habits can deteriorate the quality of your family relationships without your action and intentionality.

Here are a few of his excellent suggestions:

1. Put some limits on when phones are used. Children and adults may need to park and plug in their phones with a curfew on phone use. The Obamas don't allow their girls to use cellphones during the school week, for example. Park the phones in a place where you can monitor. Several studies have shown that teens with their phones in their rooms sleep less.

2. No cell phones at family times---mealtimes, connecting times, etc. Stack the cell phones up in a visible spot if you are out to eat together.

3. Car rides are important connecting and bonding time. Some families have a no cellphones rule for the first 20 minutes of any car ride. Remember the games we played in cars going on road trips when we grew up?

4. Do more electronics free activities with each other, like bike riding, hiking, camping, swimming, surfing and walking.

5. Teach your kids to read texts twice and when it is okay and not okay to text. I want parents to teach their children that texts are fine for brief data transmission like a time to meet, but not a place to work through relationship conflicts because it is full of miscommunication possibilities and is no substitute for brave in person discussions about emotionally charged topics. For example,
it's fine to make plans to meet at 5:00 for the movie, but don't break up with someone by text.

6. Keep talking with your children about bullying, sexting, gossiping and other potential cellphone mistakes and the possible harm that can be done. Remind them not to send out anything that they wouldn't want broadly distributed.

7. Do unto yourself. Make sure you abide by the same limits and set times when you put your own cellphone away. I often have children and teens complain to me in counseling about parents who can't stop being on their phones.

8. Don't interrupt special moments with your partner or your child to answer the phone.

Taking an active leadership role in your family is important for making sure that your family relationships don't get fragmented by cellphone use. Whether you're out on a date night, a walk with your partner, or interacting with your children, it's of crucial importance to the relationship to be engaged and fully present. This shows the other person that they are more important than anyone or anything else in the world right now, and that feels wonderful. Isn't that attention from those we love the thing we all crave and need so deeply?

Teaching Children Virtues

Parents of school-aged children get busy, and sometimes focus on their children's negative behaviors. It's important to know that as a parent, you have the power to create teachable moments to introduce your children to developing positive character traits that will serve them well all their lives. Parents don't have to take a passive role, feeling frustrated with the values in movies, society and media that impact their children and teens. Instead, you and your partner can be the choreographers in teaching your children to be virtuous.

Grandparents, aunts and uncles can also make valuable contributions by teaching positive character traits, and discussing them with the young people whose lives you touch.

To get started, you will need to make a list of the character virtues that you admire in people. Here are some to consider, but you can develop a list of your own personal favorites:

Humility/Modesty

Gentleness

Self-control

Patience

Kindness 

Compassion

Self-discipline

Productiveness

Tenacity/ Perseverance

Courage

Integrity

Honesty

Self-care

Independence

Creativity

Resourcefulness

Open-mindedness

Love of learning

Justice

Personal leadership

Forgiveness

Gratitude

Playfulness

Teamwork

Spirituality

Cultivating joy/happiness

Appreciation of beauty

Social responsibility/service

Humanity (caring for others)

You might begin by choosing which trait you want to focus on with the young person/people in your life for the next month. I generally encourage parents to begin with the virtue you believe your children are most needing for their development. For example, if your children argue with each other and annoy each other, you may want to begin with focusing on teamwork.

If you hold weekly family meetings, as I encourage all the families I work with in family counseling to do, the meeting is a great time to introduce this month's virtue. You can have one of the children make a poster to hang up in the kitchen about that value, and have each family member add examples that they see at the next family meeting.

Make a plan for how you can teach the value of each trait. You can discuss it, help the child make an art project/collage demonstrating it, do some volunteer work together to experience it, or go on an outing together to explore it. You can look for examples of a particular character trait in the news or within the people you each know and talk about it. Asking children to watch for an example that they see among their friends of a particular virtue is fun and engages them. If you are teaching about service, perhaps you can do some volunteer work as a family as well as have each family member do random acts of kindness for others and compare notes.

Have some fun and be creative. I can remember being a child and learning about choosing a positive attitude by having a hall table with an empty drawer that we pulled a smile from each day when we left the house. Small children love to use their imaginations to learn things.

Grandparents can share stories about family members and others who demonstrated living the virtue you wish to help develop.

Parents, as well as family therapists, too often focus on negative behaviors. Helping actively develop character virtues and strengths is a healthy way to help create a next generation who are wise, transcend self, humane towards others, self-motivated and wonderful to be in relationship with. I can't think of a better legacy to leave behind us.

Are the Kids Too Busy?

In the Sunday, October 13, 2013, "This Life" column of the New York Times, there was a great article written by Bruce Feiler called, "Monitoring the Giggle Index," which brought up some interesting things for parents to consider. How busy is good for children, and when is it too busy? Several children and teens I see in counseling are feeling stressed about just how many after school activities are on their plates.

Feiler reviews the literature on this topic, including "The Over-Scheduled Child," "The Pressured Child," and "Pressured Parents, Stressed-Out Kids." He points out that in recent years there have been responses that perhaps the concept of stressed out and over-scheduled kids is either overstated or a myth. While there are lots of good things about keeping children and teens busy and channeled, I always like parents to check in with the kids from time to time about how it's going.

It could be that playing 2 sports or taking 8 dance classes a week worked last year, but maybe it's not working so well this year. When school pressure accelerates, there have been changes at home like a divorce, an activity that was positive becomes a negative, or a child or teen is anxious or depressed, it's probably time to revisit and discuss with them what the right mix would be now.

Feiler points out that, at times, it can be hard to find that fine line with enough activities so your child can develop skills and outside interests that boost self-confidence, and when it's overkill. When parents are driven and successful, they can project onto their children. Parents might be anxious themselves, or  overly well-intentioned about helping the kids get into college or play a professional sport.

Most children and teens need a balance with both enrichment activities and down time. Many introverted kids and teens have told me they need some quiet time after extroverting all day with people at school. It's good to be able to dialogue with your child about what they are enjoying, and what the right mix is.

One Jungian psychologist interviewed for the column, Polly Young-Eisendrath, who wrote "The Self-Esteem Trap," feels that some parents in our generation are too wrapped up in every detail of their children's lives. Young-Eisendrath feels that parents can be obsessive, and that time to just hang out in the same room together is also important. Down time, both individually and together as a family, with cell phones and electronics off, is very important.

What can we do to avoid mistakes with making the kids too busy? Pay attention to make sure the activity is motivated from your child's interest, and not yours. Is your child or teen happy or giggly when you drop them off or pick them up from activities? Do them seem exhausted and burned out? We also need to be careful about the words we choose as parents, and the impact they have on our children. Encourage teamwork, or participating in the play, rather than getting the key role or
 maximum playing time. In the real adult life that we are preparing our children for, you don't always play quarterback or get the starring role.

Why Hooking Up Is Messed Up

In July, The New York Times ran a follow-up article to its earlier one about the death of courtship, explaining how dating practices have changed in the college-age/young adult demographic. This article focused on young women in their 20s, and how they can be so focused on their academic career, internships, volunteer work, etc. that they don't have time for a relationship and may prefer just to "hook up" or randomly have meaningless, brief sexual encounters with men they care nothing about. The New York Times interviewed successful female students at the University of Pennsylvania who make hooking up a part of their social life.

While there are young adults that make this their ritual, many teens and twenty-somethings are smart enough to know that hooking up is a really messed up thing to do that can cause long-term harm. In addition to the physical health risks of pregnancy and STDs, there are emotional consequences to becoming physically intimate with someone who is a stranger and with whom you have no relationship. It trivializes being physically close to someone else, as if it is a sport. It is not.

Many of these hook ups occur after one or both people are drinking heavily, and are not thinking clearly. All the more reason to limit or not drink alcohol. (During college it's termed partying, while after college we call it alcoholism).

I do a great deal of counseling with teens and young adults. I find that while courtship has changed some for their age group from how it was for their parents and grandparents, at the core most people need to be encouraged to stay focused on what they REALLY want, and not succumb to the pressure to handle relationships the way other people do. Separating physical intimacy from emotional intimacy in a committed relationship is a recipe for a great deal of potential hurt and damage to your developing self.

Parents of pre-teens, teens, and college-age students should be aware of this hooking up activity, and involve your son or daughter in some discussion about it. Ask them what they think. Share your concerns. Keep in mind that your son or daughter needs to feel safe talking with you, so a tone of curiosity about their opinion as a younger person, and of mutual respect will help. Chances are, even if your son or daughter isn't a part of this "hook up culture," they probably have friends who are participating in it.

Hooking up? It's a really messed up idea that puts younger people at risk, both physically and emotionally. Some cultural and societal changes advance and improve us. Hooking up isn't any kind of improvement over traditional courtship, waiting until you have time to date, and creating meaningful relationships. Everybody deserves better, including relationships that honor your highest self.

Examining Your Life Script

When we are born, we are given lots of messages, or scripts, from our family about what we should be like. They aren't formally handed out, but they are rules, expectations, and limitations that are forecasting our future. Our choice is whether we live out our script, or if we decide to understand and illuminate the script and rewrite the parts that don't work for us. Some scripts are better than others.

We get scripts about what we should be career-wise, what is possible for us as a man or woman, whether we are expected to become a parent, what marriage is like, how we are to express ourselves and communicate with others, and much more. Life scripts are powerful. If we don't examine them, they can control our life in ways we are unaware of.

Eric Berne was the therapist who defined script analysis as a key part of Transactional Analysis (TA).
Berne identified life scripts as a life plan, reinforced by parents. He felt we choose a script in childhood as a way to make sense of the world. The script helps us navigate, is what we look for, and helps us define our reality.

Here are some questions you can reflect on to understand more about your life script:

1. What is your earliest memory?

2. What did your mother and father each praise in you? What did they each criticize you for?

3. How did you parents relate to each other? Were they affectionate with you? Distant?

4. How did you play as a child? What did you want to be when you grew up?

5. If you wore a shirt which had words written on it that reflects the you that is projected to others, what would it say on the front? What would it say on the back (the part of you that isn't shared with others)?

6. What role did you play in your family growing up? Were you the hero? The scapegoat? The joker?
The fragile one?

7. Did you experience loss growing up? Did it cause you to be more fear based?

8. What was possible for women in your family? For men?

9. What alliances were there in your family? Who was close to whom? How did family members connect?

10. What lessons did you learn from your mother? Father? Grandmother? Grandfather?

11. If you could make life changes, what would you like to be doing/experiencing  in 5 years?

12. How would you like to rewrite your script? What part of your family's script would you like to  reject?

Understanding your life script can help you get unstuck, and own more of your own power to create the life you really want to be living. It can help you be aware of the myriad of choices that are available to you.

Your life is precious. Understanding how the messages you digested while growing up have impacted and are impacting your life, career, and relationships is essential. Just like actors read their lines in a play, we hold fixed beliefs about our potential and our essential self. Many times these fixed beliefs are not helpful. Challenging your fixed beliefs about yourself is healthy and important in order to live your best life, and not live a life that is too small.

No Greater Loss: Losing a Child

The events of last Friday at Sandy Hook Elementary School deeply affected me and every person I know. The heartbreak of losing 20 six and seven year old children, and 6 heroic educators, by a mass shooter at their school, is overwhelming. It has touched the universal consciousness and humanity of all of us, across the nation, and around the world. The randomness of the loss, that children could be dropped off for school in the morning and be murdered by lunchtime at the school, a place which should be safe, has made the world more anxious. It happened in Newtown, but it could have been our town.

If you get to middle age, you can't help but realize that life is full of losses, big and small ones. You can lose a love, a parent, a sibling, a friend, financial stability, a home, a job you enjoy, your health, a partner, or a marriage. Each of these losses can be very difficult. They each require a grieving process, and a rebuilding of an individual's life afterwards.

Of all the kinds of losses there are in life, I can think of no greater loss than the loss of a child. Even President Obama identified with the parents who lost their children so abruptly and needlessly on Friday, and was pausing to wipe his own tears at his press conference.

What makes losing a child so shattering?

Loss is almost always proportional to the degree that you were attached to that person that you lost. With babies and children, they are completely dependent upon their parents, so the identities of parent and young child are intertwined, not completely separate.

Losing your child at any age, but especially a young one, feels out of the natural order of things. This makes it harder to accept and process. While it is difficult to lose an older beloved family member, you are able to take some comfort at their having lived a full life. With the loss of a child, there is a surreal sense that this is wrong.

The grief continues in a sort of spiral over time as family members grieve again at every developmental milestone their deceased child will miss out on. There is grief at the time of the loss, but also when they should have graduated, driven a car, gone to college, married, and had children of their own. There is the grief for the life ahead of them they were robbed of, and your loss as parents and grandparents to share those later joys with that child.

Grieving parents need to go through the grief process--- the shock, anger, bargaining, sadness, and eventually acceptance. They need to find a way to go on, for themselves, for those who remain in their family, and to honor the child who was taken from them. Peer support is incredibly helpful for parents who have lost a child, offering a place to connect with others who truly understand the nature of this profound loss. Compassionate Friends is one such non-profit support group for parents who have lost a child.

Men and women grieve the loss of a child differently, and understanding this is essential to husbands and wives supporting each other non-judgmentally after the loss, even when what they need to heal may be different. Our grief is as individual as our thumbprints. It is helpful to know what is normal.

While both are challenging, sudden loss can be more difficult to accept and process than an expected loss. One can understand intellectually that the child is gone, but wake up the next day feeling that the loss is not real. There was no chance to prepare.

One of the last challenges with grief, after we have felt the pain of the loss, and adjusted to our world without that beloved child, is to put some of the energy that went into that relationship into other places. To effectively resolve grief, we may want to become involved in honoring the child's memory, perhaps by becoming involved in advocacy for change in the world.

In the Newtown case, using this horrific loss for creating more reasonable gun control laws makes perfect sense. I have had other parents I have worked with who helped themselves heal from their child's premature death through fundraising for research on the prevention and treatment of a disease that took their child. We can't bring our child back, but we may be able to save others. When we give action to our feelings of "enough," we help both preserve the memory of those innocents, and restore our own sense of agency, rather than powerlessness.

The death of innocent children is a profound assault to our sense of safety in the world, our sense of fairness, and a test of our faith. When bad things happen to good people, we struggle as human beings to understand the meaning. From across the US and around the world, we identify with the parents of those sweet young children who lost their lives last week at Sandy Hook. There is truly no greater loss, and it touches us all and calls us to action.

Communicating Effectively With Your Teenager

When people plan to have a child, most picture a sweet little baby who fills your heart with love. Most people aren't prepared for the teenager they become a decade or so later. If we knew in advance that they would be moody, or push the limits, or talk back, would we cancel our order?

To be a good enough parent of a teenager, it helps if you can recall how it felt when you were a teen yourself. It's a tough in-between age, where you are no longer a child, but you don't yet have the freedoms of being an adult. Can you remember feeling really self-conscious about your changing body, and the current state of your complexion? Teens worry about whether they have enough or the right friends,rejection,popularity,getting a boy/girlfriend,grades,getting into college, growing up, and about handling the future. That's quite a lot to worry about. Many teens also worry about family problems more than parents realize---a parents' drinking,arguing and unhappiness between parents,financial stress,illness,divorce,parents' dating and affairs, and more. Perhaps you can connect with the things you worried about in your family when you were growing up.

To communicate effectively with your teen, the adult needs to see past moodiness or difficult attitudes, and remain loving and kind. The adult needs to show the maturity not to be reactive and hostile back. It is important to build on your teens' strengths, take an interest in their activities and friends, and actively listen more than you talk. The adult needs to take the lead in setting a warm, friendly tone at home. Smile. Greet them. Welcome their friends gathering at your house. Set reasonable limits, and enforce them consistently. Teach and empower them to learn to do as much for themselves as they can, knowing this will help them feel more capable.(Think part-time or summer job,learning to do their own laundry,and how to cook basic meals.)Be interested in their future dreams, and help them work towards them.

If you are a step-parent, you need to try even harder. You don't have the built-in biological advantage, and there is all of that horrible "step-parent as ogre" imagery in the Disney classics. Be nice and be loving, and don't be petty or critical. Let the biological parent, your spouse, be the heavy and provide the discipline as needed. You just love them up, and provide support and encouragement.

Here are some other tips from Active Parenting of Teens. Avoid these common communication breakdowns:

*commanding, ordering, directing
*giving advice
*placating
*interrogating
*distracting/storytelling about yourself
*interpreting/analyzing/psychologizing
*sarcasm
*moralizing
*know-it-all
*judging/criticizing/blaming
*name-calling,ridiculing,shaming
*withdrawing/ignoring
*threatening

All of the above behaviors will make your teen shut down and give up on you. Don't push the teen you love, and live with, away. Open up the communication by being a beneficial presence in their lives. If you want them to trust you and open up to you, you will need to earn it by demonstrating love, optimism, hope, and belief in your teen even at the hardest times. That sweet,vulnerable child is still in there, just struggling to make their way through the turbulent teenage years. You will be so glad later that you didn't give up, and hung in there to go the distance until your teen makes it safely into adulthood.